Entering a New Market? How to Optimize Your Marketing Strategy

September 13, 2018 Christine Benton

If you want to expand your business into a new country or region, you need to ask yourself if you are you up to the challenge. You not only need the ability to reach out to new audiences, but in order to achieve long-term success you must also keep them engaged. Successful marketing on a global scale is easier said than done.

Meeting the Needs of the Global Customer

Access to information and on-demand services continues to increase around the world, making it an increasingly complex task for brands to satisfy the needs of their targeted audiences. A large percentage of consumers are likely to discontinue a relationship with a brand if they are bombarded with irrelevant information, ads, or promotions. So, if your brand misses the mark, instead of collecting a click, you will instead likely get an unsubscribe.

Optimizing Your Marketing Strategy

Before going live in a new market, take a long look at your current content – in a completely different language and environment, it may not translate accurately and achieve the same results as in your home market. Let’s focus on a couple of critical areas that you need to pay attention to if you want to meet the needs of your new audience:

Communication Preferences – A recent survey of more than 6,000 consumers across three continents concluded that the majority of consumers prefer to communicate through mobile messaging. In fact, more than 80% of them have notifications turned on for short message service (SMS) apps. What’s more, the younger you are, the more likely it is that you’ll prefer mobile messaging over any other type of communication.

Time and Frequency – Just because you understand that your target audience prefers mobile messaging doesn’t mean that you should bombard them with texts any time you think fit. Just as research on communication preferences is essential, so is experimenting with time and frequency to find what works best. You don’t want your “surprise and delight” program to turn into your “anger and unsubscribe” program.

Upgrade Your Marketing Technology

To successfully upgrade your content strategy to meet the needs of a new market, it’s not only vital to adapt the messages you send, but also to evaluate the tools you use to send them. It shouldn’t be necessary to employ dozens of different tools or an army of software engineers to build and deploy a marketing campaign in a new market. Here are three reasons why your team needs to improve its marketing technology tools:

Eliminate Inconsistency – Inconsistent consumer experiences typically result when marketing teams use different multiple-point solutions for each channel. It’s a fact that the average marketing stack consists of twelve or more tools, so it’s no wonder why seamless experiences aren’t being delivered. When you’re using different kinds of tools to send emails, direct mails, and mobile messages, your recipients will notice the differences in your messages – and not in a good way.

Prevent Internal Inconsistency – When marketing and transactional emails are sent by different teams within a large corporation, they are unlikely to be in sync. You can’t expect to talk with your customers or potential customers effectively if your internal teams aren’t communicating well with each other.

Improve Personalization at Scale – The economy is a global one, and every consumer expects to be regarded as a VIP – no matter what country they’re in. The latest technologies offer the ability to create powerful user profiles with an unlimited number of data points. When all essential customer information is located in one place, it’s possible to issue marketing messages specifically tailored to each individual.

Conclusion

Modern marketing platforms are available that enable messaging in real time across every kind of channel – websites, mobile, social media, email, direct mail. The open architecture of such platforms easily integrates with leading translation management systems (TMS) like Localize. To avoid wasting your valuable marketing dollars, your content needs to be personalized, localized, and seamlessly delivered to your targeted audiences wherever they live. So, talk to us to learn how we can help you deliver personalized marketing messages in any desired language.